In the increasingly competitive business environment, companies are constantly looking for ways to cut the cost of operation in order to increase profit and/or pass savings on to the retail consumers so as to encourage increased purchases and revenue growth. One way is to use one of the many systems that have been proposed to track inventory, such as tracking inventory with handheld bar code scanners or radio-frequency identification scanners. These systems allow for tracking of assets in a supply chain.
A drawback of current systems is that they typically are labor intensive, requiring individual workers to track inventory using handheld devices. Additionally, current tracking systems only track assets, they do not have the ability to sense the environment of the system and trigger responses based on the environment.
Additionally, current systems typically utilize nodes such as wireless access points that are only able to receive data logged by other devices and pass that data to a remote computer. Current nodes cannot gather data about an area or system. Also, current nodes do not have processing abilities at the node level. Therefore, there is a need for a reconfigurable communication and sensor network.